I'm fairly certain that anyone who openly declared themselves a colonizer for some overseas empire would not be welcomed today. My actual point though was that

I'm fairly certain that anyone who openly declared themselves a colonizer for some overseas empire would not be welcomed today. My actual point though was that building this country is not, in itself, an exclusive or special claim. We have to look at the facts on the ground as they are today. The US has a great relationship with immigrants, they make up 15% of our population. But even Alan Greenspan said that one of the purposes of H1B visas is to depress wages, and he actually proposed opening up more H1Bs because he said depressing wages on high skill workers was the easiest way to fix income inequality. That sounds crazy to me, because it's obviously not engineers who are the root of income inequality at all. But we can't deny that effects like that are real, and can be really harmful - especially to early career workers who are also facing crazy high housing costs (increasing the price of housing, is unsurprisingly another "benefit" that Greenspan likes about H1Bs).